Archive for the ‘Schleiermacher’ Category

The feelings are exclusively the elements of religion and none are excluded.

Schleiermacher

We do not lay the main stress of our religion on any opinions right or wrong. Orthodoxy is at best but a very slender part of religion if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.

John Wesley, From: Plain Account of the People Called Methodists

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

How unjustly, therefore, do you reproach religion with loving persecution, with being malignant, with overturning society, and making blood flow like water. Blame those who corrupt religion, who flood it with an army of formulas and definitions, and seek to cast it into the fetters of a so-called system. What is it in religion about which men have quarrelled and made parties and kindled wars? About definitions, the practical sometimes, the theoretical always, both of which belong elsewhere…But religion does not, even once, desire to bring those who believe and feel to one belief and one feeling. Its endeavour is to open in those who are not yet capable of religious emotions, the sense for the unity of the original source of life. But just because each seer is a new priest, a new mediator, a new organ, he flees with repugnance the bald uniformity which would again destroy this divine abundance.

Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Second Speech, THE NATURE OF RELIGION

Doctrine causes wars – those who feel religious emotions are, of course, the good guys. How postmodern, even though he said it 200 years before postmodernism.

But Scheiermacher was wrong to lump all ‘doctrine’ together: to lump the ‘hope’ of paradise through Jihad with the beatitudes or the money-grubbing ideas of penance that lead to indulgences to build St Peter’s with the true faith once for all delivered to the saints is daft. It’s a daft as when Boris Johnson equated the ‘fanaticism’ of Christians willing to die for their faith in ancient Rome with those who kill in the name of religion today.

The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of the human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in him.

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith

A denial of Christ’s divinity but yet a desire to retain a unique place for Jesus. Yet once you create a Jesus divorced from Scripture subjectivism inevitably enters. Who is to determine what ‘God-consciousness’ is in its highest form? Why is this the determining, even if subjectively defined, criterion?